My development environment, and why

I always find it interesting to see what people use for software development. Many people like VS Code, many people like Vim, many people like Visual Studio, the list goes on. I figure, it would be interesting to go through the history of what I’ve used since I was a kid, and go from there.

I started out with Visual Studio Express, and occasionally Notepad++. It was nice enough, and worked well - not that I minded much. Eventually I started playing around on the KhanAcademy website and using that for toying around with software, as well as more Visual Studio on the side.

For a long, long while, that all stuck. I didn’t really have a reason to switch. Eventually, I realized that Visual Studio felt a lot clunkier and slower than I’d like - like driving a small semi to go to the store. I discovered Jetbrains Rider (I was using C# a lot, since it was my first and favorite language) and switched over to that.

Ever since, I’ve been loving Jetbrains IDEs. I switch to VS Code every now and then, as it’s a reasonably nice experience on Mac (I’m using it to write this, in fact), but I tend to go back to Jetbrains for larger projects.

I guess I should touch on hardware a bit, too. For pretty much my whole life, I used Windows for development. I gave Linux a few good tries, but compatiblity wound up being too much of an issue every time, and I didn’t want to put the effort or the disk space into dual-booting.

When I started university, though, I needed a laptop. I wound up going for the M1 Macbook Pro, for its battery life and build quality, which I don’t regret at all. And, dang, it’s incredible to develop on Unix after all of those years on Windows. Whether or not I would get a Mac again depends on how this one lasts and the future of Windows laptops, so we’ll have to see on that. It is a tad unfortunate to have to resort to Crossover for certain things, though.

Aside from all of that, I have a homelab that I use on occasion for projects - I have Docker running on it, so it can be a nice convenience for longer term hosting, or for certain development tools. Mongo is the main one I’ve used it for. For a little while, I had a development container setup for my Graphics class - which you can find the repository (and package) for here.

A short post! I’ll add some more if I can think of anything, but there’s not a whole lot to touch on. Thank you for reading.